A NATION CHALLENGED: THE FAMILIES; Despite the Dim Predictions, Some Still Hope

Anthony Calderon and his wife, Sandra, went to a memorial service Wednesday night for Mr. Calderon's brother, Edward, who is one of the 5,000 people still missing in the ruins of the World Trade Center.

But they were not there to mourn. Instead, three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack, they believed that somehow, some way, Edward Calderon had found a way to survive. ''He was in the Marines,'' Sandra Calderon said. ''He worked in that building for 22 years. He knew the facility inside and out. He knew where to run if anything happened. Tony and I believe he's somewhere in that rubble.''

The Calderons are not alone in their belief that there is one last miracle lurking in the World Trade Center wreckage. Despite official pronouncements that it is virtually impossible that anyone else is still alive, counselors and social workers dealing with relatives of the missing say they continue to encounter family members who still think of the missing as just that.

As others mourn and bury the dead, there are relatives still waiting for responses to missing-person posters, checking with hospitals to ask about any unconscious patients, praying not for the dead but to find the living and balancing fear and dread with fragile wisps of hope. ''They believe their loved one is alive by grit, by cunning, by fate,'' said Gretchen Buchenholz, executive director of the Association to Benefit Children, an organization that has assembled a counseling corps of 70 staff members and volunteers to work with the affected families.

Within any given family, people are often found at different stages of accepting their losses, relatives and counselors said. Many end up deferring to surviving spouses to make the call about holding a memorial or getting a death certificate.

So there was a wide range of belief at the memorial service for Mr. Calderon, 44, an operations manager for the Port Authority at the World Trade Center from Union, N.J. He was eulogized as a family man, a music lover, someone who died trying to save others. His 22-year-old daughter, Ilene, sang Mariah Carey's ''Hero.'' A Marine honor guard placed a folded American flag in his wife's hands.

Mr. Calderon's wife, Debbie, said she was optimistic for days after the tragedy after her daughter and mother-in-law heard a faint voice and static in telephone calls received from what they believed to be her husband's cellphone. She and her two children finally scheduled the memorial after her 15-year-old son, Jeremy, visited the World Trade Center site. ''When he saw the devastation he said only a miracle could make him come back,'' she said.

But she decided to hold the memorial service only reluctantly, absent definitive proof of her husband's fate. ''I don't want to give up hope,'' she said. ''We said we'll do the memorial and if he turns out to be alive we'll have the biggest damned party.''

Others have steadfastly refused to think of death. In Staten Island, Dorothy Giovinazzo does not even accept condolences for her missing husband, Martin Giovinazzo, 34, a maintenance worker for Marsh & McLennan on the 93rd floor of 1 World Trade Center.

Not yet.

''People come up to me and say, 'I'm so sorry,' '' said Ms. Giovinazzo, who has three young children. ''Don't say that to me. Everybody has his way of dealing with things. This is my way. He could have been going down the stairs. He could be with a lot of people stuck in a big air pocket. I'm not doing anything until I find out, until I know.''

At city hospitals and at the center set up at Pier 94 in Manhattan to assist relatives, mental health officials and counselors say more and more survivors have turned hope into full-blown grief as the chances of rescues dim. But they say a hard-core minority has resisted any thoughts of loss.

Some relatives, like Mrs. Giovinazzo, picture whole groups of people surviving in air pockets and somehow finding access to food and water from the towers' many restaurants and offices. A father from Philadelphia told city counselors at Pier 94 that he had gone camping with his son many times and that he could be surviving in the wreckage on his skills as an outdoorsman.

New York City officials have not publicly called off the rescue operation, but Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said last week that short of a miracle it was unlikely that anyone would be found alive from the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mental health professionals, however, say not letting go is one way to cope, and counselors have refrained from talking people out of their views. ''People come to closure in different ways,'' said Dr. Michael Lesser, medical director for the city's Department of Mental Health, which has both counselors and psychiatrists at Pier 94. ''We let them talk and get their feelings out.''

Leora Lowenthal, a senior social worker at New York University Medical Center who has also counseled relatives, said that the nature of the event itself -- ''the horror of it, the violence, the feeling of human cruelty'' -- could make death harder to accept. And for many, she noted, the last communication from loved ones was a cellphone call saying that they were fine and on their way out.

But she said she had seen a similar reaction among relatives of terminal cancer patients. ''You'll find families where one person believes until the last 10 minutes of life that there'll be a miracle,'' she said.

Among the survivors of World Trade Center victims, however, the hope to see the person again could go on for a long time, said Jack Saul, director of the international trauma studies program at New York University. Mr. Saul, who last worked with families of the missing in Kosovo, said people could refuse to accept the death of a missing loved one for many years after disasters and wars. ''For some reason, it seems disloyal to the dead to give up hope,'' he said.

But some relatives insist that they have more than wishful thinking to go on. Luis Rivera, a circulation manager for The New York Times, heard from a co-worker of his missing wife, Carmen, 33, the night of the attack. His wife had headed down the stairs with her, the co-worker said, and if she had made it out, his wife must have, too.

Mr. Rivera, who imagines his wife lost somewhere with amnesia, continues putting up posters with her picture and this week began checking hospital psychiatric wards. He said he had found people from the World Trade Center at the wards -- identified but yet so traumatized they required hospitalization -- which he said bolstered his scenario.

''This is a plus,'' he said. ''There are people who totally lost it from their traumatic experience, from what they saw.''

Mr. Rivera said his three children -- a daughter, 16, and two sons, ages 13 and 8 -- held out hope as long as they knew he was still looking for their mother, who worked at 2 World Trade Center as an assistant vice president for the Fiduciary Trust Company.

He said he was not interested in applying for a death certificate, or getting one of the urns containing soil from the site that the city is handing out to the family of victims, or talking about benefits with his wife's employer, all steps more and more relatives are taking as the days wear on. ''If you claim her dead, she's no longer a missing person,'' he said. ''O.K., you get the policies, but they won't look for her anymore.''

We are continually improving the quality of our text archives. Please send feedback, error reports,
and suggestions to archive_feedback@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on October 6, 2001, on Page B00001 of the National edition with the headline: A NATION CHALLENGED: THE FAMILIES; Despite the Dim Predictions, Some Still Hope. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe